Such Small Hands Read online

  Meanwhile, the principal talked about classes, games, the other girls; she said their names as if reciting a memorized list. At that point the names were all empty, no girls inside them yet.

  “I hear you’re a very good girl,” the director said at last, when they’d finished dinner.

  And Marina felt happy, because she knew the meaning of that word. Its sound and texture were not alien to her. And starting with that word she saw how her body reappeared, fiber by fiber, over the empty plates and the water jug that might break.

  “I am; I’m good.”

  “Well, tonight you’re going to go to bed early, because everybody’s coming back tomorrow and you need to be rested.”

  The psychologist and the principal walked Marina up to the dormitory and quickly undressed her. Silently she got into bed.

  “Do you know how to make yourself fall asleep?” the principal asked. “Count each breath, slowly, until the red light turns blue. . . .”

  She was entranced by the wooden chests of drawers, by the girls’ names written in colors on the drawers: Diana, Marcela, Julia, Sara, María, Ana, Mónica, Teresa, Raquel, Celia, Paloma, Irene.

  She got out of bed and traced her fingers over the letters.

  Would they write her name in colors like theirs, too, on another drawer: Marina?

  She read them all as fast as she could. Dianamarcelajuliasaramaríaanamónicateresaraquelceliapalomairene.

  PART TWO

  IT WAS ONCE A HAPPY CITY; we were once happy girls. They used to say: do this, do that, and we did it, we turned our hands, we drew, we laughed; they called us the faithful city, the enchanting city. We had proud eyes, strong hands. People thought we were just girls then.

  We used to touch the fig tree in the garden and say, “This is the castle.” And then we walked to the black sculpture and said, “This is the devil.” And then we’d go back to the orphanage door and say, “This is the mountain.” Those were the three things: castle, devil, mountain. That was the triangle you could play in.

  And there was the hall mirror.

  And our summer dresses.

  And the night they changed our sheets and it felt so good to climb into fresh-smelling beds.

  And the days we got sanjacobos for lunch: breaded fried ham and cheese.

  It was as if we were all one mouth eating the ham, as if our cheese were all the same cheese: wholesome and creamy and tasting the same to all of us. The cheese was happiness. But then we had class after lunch, and it was long. And the time between lunch and class, and then between class and break time, passed slowly, suspended in the air.

  When class was over we liked to play. We’d sing as the jump rope hit the sand with a dull crack. To get in the circle you had to pay attention, had to calculate the jump rope’s arc, its speed, adapt your rhythm to the chorus. Once you were in you felt exposed, tense, as if each time the rope cracked down, it hit your mouth, or your stomach. With each thump you went around the world, instantly, quick as lightning; you had to make it. And hide-and-seek: you’d crouch behind a tree and then become part of the tree; if you didn’t move you were invisible. You had to stay there, kneeling, feeling the coarse playground sand digging into your knees, leaving marks on your skin, until someone called your name, and then you had to run to base, where you were safe. What a strange word: safe.

  One afternoon the adult said, “There’s a new girl coming. Don’t be scared.”

  But we weren’t then. At first we weren’t scared.

  Before Marina ever arrived, first came speculation.

  We didn’t know any other way to love.

  We went around preparing places, loving everything we could imagine, everything before our eyes. Some of us thought she’d be big, others said she’d be our size; some said she’d be very pretty, others didn’t think so. Her first triumph was this: we were no longer all the same. We, who had been tamed, we, who made no distinctions among ourselves and our bodies, we, who all wanted the same things, were no longer all the same. Suddenly there were hands that we didn’t recognize, and we became strangers. From one second to the next something had broken: our trust. It was as if, in a short space of time, we had all become aware of so many things, and they were sad, those things, so different from multiplication tables, from learning c from k, from our natural science book. Those things hurt, they flowed down like a river from upstairs, where the principal and the adults lived.

  Why was there no more joy in this: “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” There was no music to it anymore, no trees or woodchuck for us to imagine, teeth bared, just words like stones you couldn’t find. Just a foretaste of Marina who now, yes, now we were afraid of.

  Then one day, a day like any other day, she actually arrived.

  We were on our way back from a field trip and the miracle was performed. There was nothing special about her. The door opened and there was a girl, dark, pretty but not too pretty, with slack hands, shoes that weren’t like ours, silhouetted in front of the statue of Saint Anne, almost as black as her, a shape that neither spoke nor smiled, with a doll in one hand and a stick in the other. So close, and like us, the same height.

  “This is Marina,” they said.

  And yet she didn’t look like us. She had dark-girl eyes. How could we describe her? How could we say, “This is what Marina was like the first time we saw her”? We might get tired, we might start to describe her and then have to keep going back to clarify things, and nothing we said would be right except for the feeling that you couldn’t really see all the way inside that girl.

  She was always on alert. Always.

  Her eyes squinted when she was thinking, as if she herself disappeared into those slits and fed off her thoughts. And when she got up, she’d grope along, touching things, heavy, and yet seeming like she was about to take off and fly.

  “I don’t know what to do with that girl,” the adult said.

  And we didn’t know what to do with our love, either; it was so heavy.

  It would sneak up by surprise, just when it seemed like it wasn’t coming back. Suddenly, in a flash, there it would be. We’d be copying a passage from a book and suddenly realize that our lines were all crooked, or that we’d skipped a word, or that we’d made an ink stain, or that we’d smeared the bottom of the page with our arms, or that we’d accidentally creased the paper. And Marina had been there watching over that mistake.

  Everything around her was contaminated, and so were we.

  But then at recess, out on the playground, everything went back again. Marina shrank and we grew. She stood alone, with her doll, by the statue of Saint Anne, watching us. Or was it the doll who was watching? We didn’t know who the doll really was. Because sometimes she looked like Marina, and she, too, seemed to have a hungry heart, and clenched fists held close to her body, and she, too, was silent even when invited to join in; and she nodded her head back and forth, something we’d never seen a doll do before. And she seemed persecuted and excluded, too. If you sat her on the ground, from above she looked like a little girl and we were the adults, and we thought that we actually were a little like that, a tiny head you could hardly see, a head you had to lift by the chin in order to see its face. Even her face was like ours, though wary and full, like when you got scared.

  “Her eyes are broken, that’s why she can’t close them. You have to lick her eyeballs so she can see or else she can’t see.”

  Marina held out her doll; that was the first thing she’d said to us. We stuck our tongues out until the tips touched the cold glass of her eyes. And it was true: the doll could see then. Isn’t that what an eye looks like when it can see? Open, blue, impenetrable. What if she started talking? That would scare the adults, but not us, we thought. A miniature life, easy to love. Suddenly everything came to us filtered through the doll, even innocence, because we were like her and sh
e was like us. What good would it have done to say, “She’s pretty, we like your doll”?

  And it was all because Marina had come.

  It was the same with our morning showers.

  Before, we used to line up by the sinks. First we brushed our teeth. Then we took off our clothes and left them on the bench. Hot water and steam and shampoo, those things were happiness, too. And we used to play tricks all the time. Under the shower’s jet it was different: we forgot each other and felt a little alone in our pleasure, as if we’d been abandoned. We felt a hand soaping up our backs and legs, but it was an invisible hand, because you had to close your eyes so you didn’t get soap in them.

  Who was the first one to notice it? We don’t remember. We don’t even know if we actually saw it: Marina’s scar. We had to defend ourselves against that scar that Marina didn’t hide. Suddenly we saw each other seeing it, we differentiated each other among things, among the others, we differentiated her, her back, her walk, her eyes, her face like a vague feeling of fear.

  We didn’t know sadness until we had a point of comparison.

  And it all started there, like a breach, in her scar.

  We became aware of each other and we felt naked before that body that wasn’t like our bodies. For the first time we felt fat, or ugly; we realized that we had bodies and that those bodies could not be changed. Just as she had materialized, we materialized: these hands, these legs. Now we knew that we were inescapably the way we were. It was a discovery you could do nothing with, a discovery that served no purpose. We huddled together when she approached. We were afraid to touch her.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the adult asked.

  But she was staring at us and she was so close; it was like she were saying, “It’s my secret. All mine.”

  “Would you mind telling me what on earth is the matter with all of you today?” they asked.

  But Marina didn’t react, didn’t get involved. She stood there, patient. She closed her eyes when she was told to, and we watched the shampoo bubbles being rinsed from her hair, sliding down her body to her feet; and the swirl they made in the drain, we saw that, too, and the towel they used to dry her with.

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS Marina discovered was this: their shoes were all the same. Black, round-toed shoes. All of their faces too dark, too tanned and hardened by the sun. All of their dresses too bright.

  Sunlight and air filtered through the girls’ dresses and their hands, and they held onto their toys too tight. They’d been stripped of something childlike and yet their faces were childlike, it was as if their bodies had developed too early, before their faces, or their faces too late, a step behind their bodies.

  Maybe that’s why it was so hard to tell them apart.

  Marina started at their shoes and worked her way up. The higher she looked the more differences she discerned: fatter knees, skinnier legs. But when she got to their faces she had the impression she’d made a mistake along the way, that the legs she’d started at didn’t belong to the face she’d ended up at but to another, darker one, a face that never actually materialized yet whose presence she could perceive: a common face.

  What difference did it make that one of them walked over and said her name was Diana? Couldn’t she just as easily have been Sara or Julia or Marcela? It was miraculous that they moved at all. When she thought of them they seemed permanently still, stunned. Maybe later, when Marina stopped looking and crouched down to her doll, they changed, differentiated themselves; there was no way to know. In class they sat with their backs to her and in her mind she pictured the arm of one leading to the head of another, jumping from their feet to their skirts, through their fingers. The imaginary figure stood still a second and then faded away. And then suddenly it was night and they went to dinner.

  They were different when they were sleeping.

  All together, they looked like a team of sleepy little horses. Something in their faces slackened, became friendly. They slept with an unbearable patience. When they were asleep they were like an oil painting, they gave Marina the impression that different faces rose up from beneath their faces, faces that bore no resemblance to their daytime faces: peculiar, polished faces. They had a defiant, challenging quality about them despite being at rest, like dozing predators. If she looked closely, Marina could see the pulse on their necks, could smell their sleep smell, different from their daytime smell, more sickly sweet, or maybe just a little more intense. Some of them got tiny little folds, miniscule creases by their mouths, invisible gills that made them seem like sea creatures that only came out at night.

  Why were they beautiful then?

  She didn’t know. Marina was fixated on the ellipsis of the girls’ sleeping faces. She couldn’t wait for night, pretending to fall asleep immediately and then waiting until they were breathing deeply. Then she’d count to fifty, and when she was sure they were asleep she’d sit up slightly to see them better. The slightest sound startled her and she’d lie back down in bed, closing her eyes and counting to fifty once more.

  Sometimes she’d sit up and nothing moved; silence floated over the dormitory. She’d slip out of bed feeling the cold floor tiles beneath her feet and creep over to one of them. She’d get so close her lips would brush against her. She’d think, “If she woke up now she’d see me,” and that thought frightened her. She’d rest her head very carefully on the pillow, inhaling the girl’s breath.

  Just like pain. Exactly like pain.

  The orphanage psychologist dwelled on it obsessively. She’d ask her to describe inkblots, make her draw things, and then suddenly ask about her parents and the accident.

  The accident.

  “My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital.”

  It was like leaning over one of the sleeping girls’ sweet-smelling, inscrutable faces. She could get as far as, “This one has a small nose, that one has thicker lips than the other, and this one breathes differently; this one rests her arms on her chest and that one lays them at her sides like a corpse; and there’s one who never closes her eyes all the way and that’s her way of sleeping.”

  “Tell me what you remember.”

  “I remember the upholstery. It was dark, with fine white lines.”

  “Describe the upholstery.”

  “Black, dark blue, almost black. And scratchy.”

  The enumeration of details satisfied the psychologist. The deliberate, meticulous, polished enumeration. Marina made an effort to recall even the most circumstantial details, colors and shapes, words the psychologist jotted down anxiously in a black notebook. Whenever her memory failed her, she’d just invent a color and slot it between true things. That seemed to change the scene, to turn her memories into things that were solid, things you could take out of your pocket and put on the table. Was the psychologist writing, or drawing? Was she maybe drawing one of the girls’ faces? Yes, that was it: a sleeping-girl face.

  “What else do you remember?”

  “There was sand on the floor of the car, just a little, a little pile of sand, and I was watching it and thinking it was going to move when we went around the curve.”

  “And did it move?”

  “No.”

  Then back to the same, always the same.

  “My father died instantly and then my mother died in the hospital.”

  But the cadence of the words had changed now. They were like an accusation, a shameful secret, something that flowered just below the skin’s surface, like a swamp plant; now the words were moist, and they grew. The other girls’ existence made it impossible for her to inhabit the suburbs of the words. When she was dreaming the words she felt like they spent their time there, above her face, and that they were as old as a building, as the furniture.

  “And what else?”

  “The lines were very thin, and then they got thick.”

  “How could that be?”

  “They did, they got thick. And the seat wasn’t scratchy anymore; it got soft. And I thought that
after a while my feet were going to touch the floor and then I’d be able to move the little pile of sand with my toe.”

  That was about the time that caterpillars started appearing in the playground. You had to be careful because they stung, the adult said. You’d see them parading majestically, covered in very fine hair like little mink coats, always single file. Marina wondered how a caterpillar’s body worked, what the springs and levers looked like that made it arch like that, so that every time it moved it was like a shiver passing through its body.

  “Then I felt a shiver go through my whole body. It started in my head and went all the way to my feet.”

  “Before the accident?”

  “Yes.”

  They always headed for the trees and then climbed their way up. Caterpillars wore masks, too. If you looked at them up close their faces were old and black and wrinkled, like the statue, and they looked like they were going faster than they really were. It made her dizzy to think that they were dangerous, that they stung. Marina picked up a stick. She thought of a number: four. She started counting from the head of the procession. One. Two. Three. Four. And the fourth one she jabbed with the stick. The caterpillar recoiled, as if it had received an electric shock, and a dark liquid bled out. Marina was transfixed, unable to pull the stick out. The rest of the procession froze, too, immediately. Marina salivated. What movement, what contact, what inaudible sound had been communicated to them, “Number four just died”? How had the news traveled from one to the next? It was strange: they stopped entirely.

  “And then everything stopped.”

  “After the accident, you mean?”

  “Yes, after, right after.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. And I thought if I sat still, everything would turn to stone and I would turn to stone, too.”

  “And what happened?”

  The circle happened. Their being frozen wasn’t real. Slowly, the other caterpillars began to bob, looking like they were turning towards the center, where they had to bow, and the fourth caterpillar was the center. Marina realized then that she wasn’t alone, that the other girls had gathered around her. The fourth caterpillar was still moving. Was it asking for something? Which of the surrounding caterpillars had it loved the most? The procession’s activity hadn’t come to a close, just as the circle of girls surrounding Marina had not closed. She could feel their breath, their bodies pressing against her back, a girl’s head peering over her shoulder. If she turned now, she’d kiss her accidentally.